infinite others…..some of which I’ve participated in, some of which I’ve “encouraged” my colleagues to participate in

Helped me spawn a different type of cheap, engaging and imaginative CPD opportunity: libteachmeet, which was translated from a forum for teachers, and has been adapted and rethought repeatedly for and by librarians – see the wiki, the original blog, and the chapter about it , oh, and another presentation at the Istanbul conference

Encouraged me to learn from others as much as learning from the “teacher” – it’s the reading of other participants blogs that teaches you as much as following the steps of the task for the “Thing”.

It was a great opportunity to hear what are the important issues for research nurses, and to get an insight into the amazing work they do.

I’m made a story of the tweets from the event (other people’s tweets will have much more insight than mine, I know) https://storify.com/ilk21/cbrsymp16, but here’s a few take-homes that have stuck in my mind.

personalisation of medicine

It’s an amazing thing to realise that Cambridge patients have given researchers the data to prove that there are not 4 different types of breast cancer, but 10 owing to genomic distinctions. One size/shape of treatment does not fit all. This personalisation of treatment is an amzaing breakthrough. But unless you personalise the treatment through taking time with the patient who’s just received the diagnosis, who’s about to undergo the treatment, and whose family members have perhaps died from what they see as the same disease, you’re not really caring as well as you could. Unless you personalise the opportunity for healthy volunteers to contribute to the research you’re not going to have a massive dataset to work with.

It’s often the research nurses who take the time to connect with the patients and volunteers.

Nurses will be in very short supply in the coming years – 12% intake in the coming year but 20% loss as experienced nurses retire or leave the profession.

How can we ensure that all nurses are engaged in research, so that every nurse is a research nurse, with the potential for every patient (every citizen) as a research participant?

help them/us understand

Research literacy of patients and volunteers is really important for recruitment and retention – there’s lots of expert patients (particularly in Cambridge!), so why not lots of research expertise? Better understanding will help engagement and retention of research recruits. This starts with the quality of patient information which is designed by research groups, and is used to ensure informed consent, but can stretch beyond that too.

translation and communication of results

Do the patients involved in the research the courtesy of presenting the results of the research that their cells/bodies/minds have contributed to, in a way that they can understand. I don’t mean dumbing it down (see above) but in a way that is meaningful to them. Do this and you might get them to engage in research in the future.

are you a linchpin?

Linchpins make the work happen, efficiently and safely. Who are the linchpins in your organisation? (psst – it might be you!) How can they be rewarded? Can you learn how to become one?

It’s taken me so long to write up my thoughts after this conference – but the jist of it was done in 20 minutes over coffee just after I’d left building.

It was great to get an insight into the world of research nurses – impressed, doesn’t even begin to cover it!

As well as all the opportunities to catch up with colleagues from around the country there were first class speakers (as usual!)

Murray Hope works for HEA, and he spoke about the forthcoming Teaching Excellence Framework. Quality assessment should be seen by institutions as an opportunity to reflect on what went badly as well as to showcase what went well. To simply sweep less successful outcomes under the carpet is missing the point, and might lead to a lack of innovation just in case it doesn’t work. It’s the same with only using metrics to measure success – they miss some of the nuance. So too much reliance on the National Student Survey is easy, but not enough.

A very brief overview suggests that in the first year TEF will be effectively a rubber stamping exercise to ensure institutions demonstrate they have processes in place. Year 2 will require the whole institution to take part, but here’s the interesting part… Year 3 will be a pilot year for subject submissions as well as institution wide, and Year 4 will be a subject only badge.

The real opportunities are for subjects to shine in their own right, and there’s even more opportunity when specialisation increases. For example, there’ll be recognition for excellence in delivering courses by distance learning. Obviously the OU will be gunning for this, because it allows other aspects of the institution to be recognised. (could this be an opportunity for librarians and their services to be given recognition?)

We don’t know yet just how granular this process will be (eg delivery of ancient history teaching in a university might be a very different experience from the history teaching), but it’s going to become increasingly important that any teaching delivered and supported by librarians would be well supported by a formal qualification (the like of which HEA can provide).

The next session was from Sheila MacNeilof Glasgow Caledonian University on Learning Analytics – a brave new world or back to the future? Her slides are here:

There was so much to take away from Sheila’s excellent talk – hugely engaging speaker. But ideas like the fact that learning analytics use trances that learners leave behind to help us improve their learning – what a fascinating idea.

She reminds us that people and process are much more important than the product or the platform, but most fascinating was the prospect of trying to accommodate and monitor the social learning that goes on and can have as much benefit for the student as the formal learning. [this makes measuring the impact of our contribution in the way that Alison Brettle was encouraging us to do yesterday all the harder, surely….sigh!]

The problem with analytics so much of the time is that, in true Voltaire fashion, that just because you can measure things doesn’t make them the most valuable, and sometimes the most valuable are things that are difficult to measure. And at the end of the day you can measure all you like, but if you don’t change your behaviour, then what was the point. And sometimes it’s ok to be good enough…. (dangerous thoughts!)

We heard from Iain Baird about the value of the qualification which allowed him to become a “teacher librarian”, though he still professes he’s a librarian who teaches. A key part of the process was that he questioned what he did in the classroom on a more formal/consistent basis. He also started to use the language of a teacher – constructive alignment became part and parcel of his interactions with tutors and course organisers – to ensure that the end goal for the student is achieved. This has resulted in him going into a class not thinking “what do I want to teach“, but rather “what do I want students to learn and what do students want to learn“.

Iain also reminded us of the difference between surface and deep learning – “how is not enough, students need to understand why“ and then they’ll change behaviour.

We had a great demonstration of research in practice from Delyth Morris, telling us about her systematic review of IL programmes for taught students in higher education (soon to be published). It was reviewing the literature on student perceptions of online versus face-2-face information literacy skills sessions. Two previous SRs has been done but they were 10 years old, so high time to consider the newer literature. Delyth highlighted a checklist for critical appraisal of articles on educational interventions that she used in her appraisal of the literature, which was a new one for me.

What became apparent was that there was a gap in the search around blended learning and also flipped classroom. She also considered that there was a future role for mapping how students find the information by themselves, and then to ask them what would have been a useful intervention from librarians (this sounds all a bit #UXlibs to me).

Her work also involved doing an RCT with the Cardiff students testing an online library induction vs a face-2-face one. Great stuff!

The final contribution from fellow #uhmlg-ers was from Angela Young of UCL, with a very modern (for us!) contribution with a video of her flipped classrooms.

“The flipped classroom is a pedagogical model in which the typical lecture and homework elements of a course are reversed. Short video lectures are viewed by students at home before the class session, while in-class time is devoted to exercises, projects, or discussions.” educause.edu

The great thing was that the technology allowed the pre-class online learning allowed for students to test themselves, and if they get the question/task right they continue onto the next stage of the module, but if they get it wrong there’s some additional slides to support and correct the learning.

Angela’s face-2-face sessions were highly interactive, using polleverywhere to ensure that there was as much engagement as possible, and the session went at the correct pace because learning was tested at every stage.

I’ve just had a great couple of days at the UHMLG Summer conference in Glasgow. The theme was teaching excellence, which was just up my street. All the tweets are available on a Storify, but I thought I’d put down a few thoughts.

there were great speakers, and plenty of food for thought. Here’s some of the good stuff:

First off Alison Brettle talked about “Demonstrating the value of health and academic library information and knowledge workers“.

She recognised that impact – the difference or change resulting from contact with the library service – was sometimes intangible, and hard to demonstrate was specifically the result of library input. For example yes, we may provide information to answer a clinical question, but this will not be the only input that might be responsible for an improvement in outcome for the patient. She also raised the fact that in terms of demonstrating outcome, quantitative measures were most commonly used, but qualitative measures were often more meaningful.

She cited lots of papers that she extracted data from as part of her scoping review around the value of LKS workers (interesting aside, were her comments about the difference between a scoping review (chart data, rather than appraise the data)).

It was interesting what a low value user satisfaction surveys have – really, it’s no use to us to know that library users like the service we provide. We need to be able to show what difference we make to the outcomes that matter to our stakeholders.

Interesting and frustrating outcome of Alison’s work seemed to be the variety of ways by which impact was reported– with so much variation it’s not possible to make any reasonable comparisons. So just as reporting of RCTs or systematic reviews needs consistency to be able to compare, so we as library professionals should be working to make it as easy as possible to show that one service makes as much impact as another by using the same reporting methods or the same core outcomes.

What return on investment is NOT is a user satisfaction survey, as mentioned above. We need to ensure that we talk in terms of what stakeholders value, and use the terminology that they will understand. How many times do librarians stand accused of too much librarian jargon? If we don’t adapt our language and presentation then the message will be lost.

Now it’s true, that impact of librarianship on the outcome that will impress our stakeholders is sometimes hard to disentangle from other influences (an increase in the number of first class degrees might be influenced by access to library resources but we will never be solely responsible for this as an outcome), so presenting qualitative “stories” of the impact can be powerful evidence.

– or why there’s no point doing a systematic review if you don’t report it properly.

So this is going to be a little bit of rant, plus a bit of pleading, and a call to arms.

What’s the point of doing any form of research if you report it so inadequately that people are almost morally obliged to ignore it?

Or if you are so selective in your reporting that it gives a completely wrong impression of the results?

The question of not reporting it at all (non-publication of PhDs, for example) is for another day.

There have been plenty of examples where poor reporting of randomised controlled trials has resulted in a false understanding of the efficacy of a treatment. Think Tamiflu or Reboxetine. Both of these, and plenty more like them are the reason behind AllTrials, (and all power to it.)

The topic of the papers was, I think, just a way of keeping the workload manageable (analysing 162 papers is enough of a workload on top of your day job), and so too was the range of years covered, but the point of it was to see if any of the SRs or MAs actually conformed to the reporting guidelines that are available, and was a contribution by a librarian to the whole process visible.

It produced some very interesting (depressing?) results. Here’s just a few of them…..

80% of paper did NOT mention PICO

68% of the searches were NOT fully described & transparent (absolutely essential for any reproduction of the work in the future)

66% did NOT use controlled vocabulary (MeSH, etc)

48% did NOT explicitly use synonyms (put this together with the previous point, and I don’t actually think it equates to a literature search, far less a systematic review!)

49% did NOT recognise any risk of bias in their work (eg language limitations)

most studies only used one database – a significant source of bias, and a virtual guarantee that relevant papers will be missed.

less than 10% of papers mentioned a contribution by a librarian

This is a relatively small study but alarm bells are clanging like crazy.

spoiler:
“Problems remain with SR search quality and reporting. SRs with librarian or information specialist co-authors are correlated with significantly higher quality reported search strategies. To minimize bias in SRs, authors and editors could encourage librarian engagement in SRs including authorship as a potential way to help improve documentation of the search strategy.”

We can help researchers publish better work!!

There are some tremendous reporting guidelines for all sorts of research (they’re pulled together in one place by EquatorNetwork (and all power to them!)) and plenty of specific advice around reporting of systematic reviews:

The first professional library conference I attended was ICML in London in 1998, and it was sooo enormous, I didn’t know how to take it all in. I was very new to the profession, so couldn’t really judge the relevance of what I was hearing, and didn’t know anyone (except that I got to know my future colleagues at Leicester – so I did learn the value of a good social event, except I didn’t learn that lesson so well as it turns out…….)

I remember being such a scardey cat that I hid in my room rather than attend the conference dinner of the first LILAC that I attended when I didn’t know anyone. I must have been insane – LILAC are so friendly, and any conference dinner – despite the prospect of dancing librarians – is a must.

But I have also got so many good ideas, have met so many lovely people, have developed such strong relationships and connections with colleagues from across Europe that I can only conclude that I have become a better attendee.

so that’s got me to thinking……

what makes a good conference attendee?

being a little open, and a little (a lot?) brave
the point of conferences is that everyone in the room has at least one thing in common. And the other thing they have in common is that they’re (probably) very nice. So go on, be a little brave and say hello.

try to see the woods for the treesok, so maybe the project or service that you’re hearing about can’t be transferred exactly to your situation, but some aspect of it might be. So being able to spot what you can translate, what flavour you can bring back home is a huge advantage. Not all sessions will change your entire library, but sometimes they can change you

It can justify your attendance (particularly in times of financial constraint)

it can be a way of developing and improving your presentation delivery – mostly the audience will be kind.

workshops to peers can be a really good way of experimenting before you extend it to others – again, your peers want you to do well, and will be kind (mostly!)

we’re an evidence based profession, so important to act like the people we’re supporting – doing research, presenting, publishing

share

share by tweeting at the time, or blogging afterwards

it helps those who can’t attend,

helps those who are there but in a parallel session,

it can help the understanding of those present in the same session (as was the experience of a colleague, there should be a fuller explanation in a blog I hope to read soon….)

and can raise your profile too (hopefully in a good way…)

sharing is particularly important if you are in a leadership position, and your absence brings no discernible benefit. Your team can survive without you, but it will always help reduce negativity if they know what you got out of the attendance, what the service gets out of your absence.

This is by no means an exhaustive list – what would you add?

A lot of it is aspirational – I am a better conference attendee, but by no means an ideal or expert conference attendee.